Greening Your Home: The Site

Whether they have come to the residential housing field from building new homes, remodeling old ones, weatherizing them, supplying building materials for them, or greening them, more and more practitioners are recognizing the need to see a house as a system and are seeking to improve building performance. But each discipline has a slightly different take on what these goals mean. Having participated in all five of these approaches to creating better residential living spaces over the years, I believe it is imperative that we see how we all complement one another. Through recognizing this,we can help each other find the most comprehensive overview of the creation, maintenance, repair, and improvement of our living spaces. Persons dedicated to green or sustainable building need to learn that an energy-efficient building envelope is the first step to energy efficiency. By the same token, those creating living spaces that perform much more efficiently need to be constantly reminded that this must be done with materials and systems that do minimal harm to the environment or to the persons living in them. There are many ...